Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Palestinian Authority is going to seek a state of Palestine from the United Nations in September, which will fly through the Jew-baiting General Assembly with broad support in short order, and it is my contention that Palestinian statehood will not face a US veto as Israel expects in the more powerful UN Security Council. I believe that just as the Obama administration surprised Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu while he was in the air on his last trip to Washington that Barack Hussein Obama intends to ambush all lovers of Zion by ordering America's UN Ambassador Susan Rice to abstain from the vote; thereby allowing the Palestinian state to come into being at Israel's expense without the Palestinians having to renounce violence or make any compromise of their own. The new Palestine does not necessarily spell doom for the Jewish State but seems to make a new "intifada" inevitable, regional war almost certain, and world war more rather than less likely. The creation of Palestine becomes the blessing of a terror state founded in jihad and will further turn Israel into a pariah state like apartheid South Africa. The formation of a belligerent Palestine intended to supplant the Jewish State of Israel is utterly unjust and no good will come of it.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Barack Hussein Obama spoke today to America's veterans and appeared about as comfortable as Pauly Shore addressing atomic scientists. Obama's world view is that the great patriots who form our all-volunteer military are there for education benefits, a jobs' program, or as last hope welfare for those who are unemployable elsewhere (without the hand-up of some government program). Obama is largely wrong on all these counts. The primary motivation for most who join our service is love of country with the subsidiary benefits (GI Bill, health care, VA loans, etc.) just adding to the decision for many. Sadly, Obama does not grasp the patriotism factor and even disparages real sacrifice by only focusing on perks for military members and veterans. What our armed forces want is rules of engagement that allow them to protect themselves and their comrades robustly and a President and chain of command that is firmly committed to do everything to win.

Bernie Madoff gave a self-serving, fiction-filled interview aired today to a FOX Network business reporter. Madoff said his behavior was common practice on Wall Street. As I said in my recent column "World's Crookedest Casino", I fear on this one aspect, Madoff may be right. With a number of other fraudsters, scammers, and pyramid schemers uncovered such as Enron and other Ponzi brokers being ferreted out, one worries how many others may still be operating freely with regulators as incompetent or corrupt as they were in the Madoff case. Some might even contend that Social Security itself is a giant Ponzi scheme. In any event, you may not earn any interest stuffing your money in a mattress or garner rich dividends but at least it will not vanish into the ether there or into one of the con man's coffers.

Monday, August 29, 2011

(With apologies to Sebastian Junger): Hurricane Irene is now a memory, with all that is left to do being make repairs and tally costs. Weather prediction remains a flawed science (though some who can not foresee a hurricane's path or strength insist man is altering the climate sufficiently to destroy the earth), and thankfully though still killing more than twenty and doing billions of dollars worth of damage, the hurricane was much less destructive than the so-called experts forecast it to be and the political class warned about. The discrepancy in Hurricane Irene worked toward humanity's favor and for that we must be thankful, but what disturbed me were Democrat politicians on the Sunday morning policy wonk shows politicizing the storm. Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley was the first partisan hack I saw trying to contrast how on the ball Barack Hussein Obama was with the last President Bush's Hurricane Katrina "flyover". This political attack line was then followed by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. The effort to turn a natural event into raw partisan political capital was disgusting. Hurricane Irene with credit to God's grace was no Hurricane Katrina.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Hurricane Irene will certainly be costly, both in monetary terms and in loss of human life with a double figure death toll already, but thankfully, God has been merciful and America should give thanks that we were spared another Katrina or Hugo sort of disaster. Recovery will no doubt be rough though with many millions out of power and the final tally to repair all the damage will certainly be in the billions of dollars. But all in all, Hurricane Irene turned out to be an example of God's grace with unmerited favor blessing we many sinners with protection we do not deserve. All praise belongs to the Lord.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

The globe's most dishonest gambling parlor did not burn in Mexico earlier this week. It is not in Nevada or some dusky foreign locale. It is not even in a Third World backwater. The casino where billions are routinely lost by the suckers (individual investors, folks with 401(k)s, you and your neighbors) is Wall Street. Can you imagine a venue where more is lost yet the gamblers keep playing? What could be more corrupt than Warren Buffet meeting with Barack Hussein Obama, then suddenly buying five billion dollars of Bank of America stock, and agreeing to host a major fundraiser for Obama? It smacks of quid pro quo with Buffet and Obama doing each others' bidding. A major US bank is flagging and Buffet is brought in to serve as White Knight saving the company and buttressing the entire American economy while Obama appears to be listening to the sage advice of the Wizard of Omaha and boosting his capitalist colors, so one hand washes the other and the President and the partisan billionaire enjoy a win-win- but what about the fundraiser? Since when did oligarchs enjoy such power in the United States and since when did the wealthiest elites and the political class do so much to protect each other? Crony capitalism makes the real capitalists, the risk takers, the individual investors, retirees and those soon to be relying on pensions, the marks and with Obama in the Presidency, only the largest investors and power brokers, the players.

Friday, August 26, 2011

My hometown of Nashville, Tennessee is beset with a plague of aggressive panhandlers masquerading as newspaper vendors. They are a blemish- no a blight- and project the worst image of Music City imaginable. The sales force is supposedly composed of the homeless and the so-called paper which is nothing more than pap is purportedly being sold to integrate them into the working community. There is one vendor downtown who must have formerly been in what has been euphemistically called the "human relations" trade and she still dresses and flirts like she is soliciting a trick. She also sports expensive Western wear right down to a shiny concho belt and has what appears to be a smart phone better than those doctors carry as she interrupts the traffic, both auto and pedestrian, on or near Commerce Street. If we had any city leaders in authority, they would use order offenses to crack down on this pestilence or require that newspapers be available only inside stores or sold or even given away through dispensing machines or vendor stands to rid the cities of this nuisance.

Barack Hussein Obama spends an unseemly amount of time at leisure, more time in fact on vacation than any US President in a comparable time period. Even as Gaddafi fell and as an enormous hurricane bore down on America, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, who often travels separately at additional expense to the American taxpayer, enjoyed the hospitality of Martha's Vineyard. For the Obama family nothing gets in the way of their down time as they celebrate all the perks of office without too much attention to the accompanying responsibilities.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Cash-strapped states across America are turning or attempting to turn to legalized gambling to shore up revenue collection without alienating tax-paying voters. This is an odious notion that can not work. First, it is a tax on those least able to afford it, the poor and ill-educated who tend to gamble the most. Second, it spawns gambling addiction, a disease that ultimately carries tremendous societal cost. Third and lastly, gambling has been an invitation to organized crime almost everywhere it has been legalized, further burdening law enforcement and potentially corrupting our political class and regulatory authorities (if they are not corrupt already). The other aspect that is not considered in the gaming debate is whether gambling revenues really aid the state. Look at Las Vegas and the state of Nevada and you will find that despite casino revenue pouring in for generations, Nevada suffers extreme rates of bankruptcy, foreclosure, and unemployment and the state has trouble balancing her own books. The same could be said of New Jersey and her fiscal travail despite decades of legalized gambling in Atlantic City. The libertarian in me militates against the state deciding how anyone spends or squanders the money that they have earned, but so far as casinos or state lotteries go, the fact is states with legal gaming are just as bad off as states without, so it must be said legalized betting solves nothing.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The state of Tennessee should not permit Internet retailer Amazon to evade the collection of sales tax. Every brick and mortar store in Tennessee is placed at an automatic disadvantage to Amazon as they all must still collect sales tax. Every individual Tennessean along with Amazon's business competitors are now forced to subsidize Amazon. That means my family, your family, and the store down the street all must pay more so Amazon can pay less and that is inherently unfair. Even worse, those with less scruples may go to the neighborhood shoe or electronics store and try out merchandise that they will then purchase on Amazon.com to elude the nearly ten percent sales tax Tennessee levies on every other business with a physical (rather than virtual, that is online only) presence in Tennessee. The state of Tennessee assisting Amazon comes at too great an expense.

Barack Hussein Obama has become the master of a concept of "leading from behind" wherein an endeavor of international or domestic importance goes well and one who has hidden in the rear is rewarded with credit from the American dinosaur press, but if the effort had fallen short, the leader who has evaded having to lead (as Obama proudly proclaimed qua Libya) has succeeded in insulating himself from blame for failure and will plausibly be able to wash his hands of it- a real win-win situation with a handmaiden media, who want to crown Obama the father of all successes, gladly doing the groundwork. In fact, comparisons between the last President Bush in Iraq said to be the cause of thousands of American dead and a trillion dollars in US monetary costs are already being made with Obama supposedly proving that "cowboy" aggressiveness could have been avoided with no American lives lost and America spending less than a billion dollars in Libya to depose Muammar Gaddafi. Except of course, the seven million Libyans are not the twenty-five million Iraqis. Libya never seized Kuwait. Libya is not Iraq. Muammar Gaddafi still roams free to do further damage, and Gaddafi though a tyrant and murderer in his own right is no Saddam Hussein, other than that- the Obama mouthpiece media shows a dead on symmetry between the two benighted Arab despots (the late Saddam and Gaddafi) and surely shows how much smarter and effective Obama is than George W. Bush.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Two earthquakes struck disparate parts of the United States today, one in Colorado that was relatively rare and one on the East Coast with a magnitude not experienced since the nineteenth century. With a Palestinian state expected to come into being in September, could this have been a message from On High that if the Holy Land is riven so too will be America?

There can exist a gulf between effort and success. Barack Hussein Obama compared his bowling to the "Special Olympics" early in his administration on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I greatly admire the guts and grit of Special Olympians for whom the victory is in the trying, but the same can not be said of leaders of nations. Either President Obama is giving it his all but his all does not match the challenge or his objectives are at great variance from what the vast majority of the body politic want in the United States. I believe and have stated since before the 2008 Presidential election that Obama aims to "transform" our country in precisely the way he has been and that he is deliberately engineering the decline America is in- isn't that "special"?

Monday, August 22, 2011

Forging freedom or what passes for it in most of the world is a bloody endeavor. Even with victory apparently in the rebels' grasp, the fighting is claiming a heavy toll with many non-combatants being felled by bullet and shell that were not directed at them. Depending on what government emerges of course, the sacrifice may well be worth the cost but if a different tyranny to Gaddafi is imposed, little will have gained by his departure.

Along with the "new price" or "price reduced" signs bedecking many of the homes for sale, I have noticed an alarming rise in the number of "going out of business" signs and that can not be good news. I heard the anarchist and union thug protesters disrupting banks and the Wisconsin capitol shouting "this is what democracy looks like" and that may well be today in the Obama dystopia, but it sure is not what prosperity looks like.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

(Or the Triumph of Leading from Behind): After suffering under the despotism of Muammar Gaddafi for more than a generation, it seems certain that the Libyan people are about to free themselves (with a modicum of Western help). Muammar Gaddafi had little natural constituency and ruled through tribalism, cronyism, and mostly, fear. Gaddafi is not exactly beloved by the Libyan people, and he will certainly not be missed by the survivors of the massacred victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and those killed by the falling debris in Scotland. Removing Gaddafi is no accomplishment of the West or NATO and least of all of the craven Obama administration but of the Libyan people themselves. Gaddafi's departure, if and when it occurs, will have come in spite of the Western allies, not because of it. What will become of Libya after the revolution is anyone's guess but beware of the Islamists who have taken a leading edge in the fighting.

Today, I watched a program on a former prison farm in Shelby County, Tennessee that has been converted into a major park complex. In the 1970s, a developer hoped to purchase the land to construct a model city but at the last moment, his plan was rebuffed largely thanks to the opposition of other property developers. To cover that angle, one must recognize that the less land there is in private hands, the more valuable the privately-held property becomes due to the immutable law of supply and demand. The rival developers did not act because they so loved the public and wanted to grant them more access to parks or out of any other sense of altruism but resisted to feather their own nests and enhance the value of what they already controlled. The same may be said of the vast tracts of land that the Federal government has turned into National Parks. Those with previously existing mineral rights were all too happy to have resource-rich land taken off the table and kept out of production because their already harvested minerals that they maintain access to, and the resources and the right to mine more would become all that much more dear. When a government arrogates land unto itself, the citizen pays for it many times over and in ways not always readily seen. The higher cost at the gas pump that the public absorbs every time an area is deemed off-limits to oil exploration is just one of them. A few profit from environmental and seemingly charitable impulses but to the vast majority, parks create a hidden cost that we must bear.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Is it not ironic that the international human rights regime which was established after World War II to prevent another Holocaust is now being turned against Israel in an attempt by enemies of the Jewish State to facilitate the destruction of the Jewish people? The course of history has shown the Jews that too often ill-intent and good intentions produce the same end.

The GOP race for a candidate to contest Barack Hussein Obama for the US Presidency is as clear as mud at this point. New candidate Rick Perry, the long-term governor of Texas, has thrown more confusion into the contest, seeming to supplant former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the favorite, but in the next showcase for the Republican vote, New Hampshire, Romney with his power base originating in a neighboring state, would remain the natural favorite in a "live free or die" state vote. There are other good prospects like Michele Bachmann who won the Iowa straw poll but who has made some relatively inconsequential gaffes like confusing Elvis Presley's dates of birth and death and who wrongly stated Concord, New Hampshire was the location of the early US Revolutionary War battle. Considering that Barack Hussein Obama is systematically disassembling the nation as the Founders envisioned her and has tripped over his own tongue by saying the country had "fifty-seven states", Bachmann's missteps are minor and certainly do not disqualify her. She will likely not play as well in New Hampshire though. Right now, the Republican field is still emerging and it is less than clear who the favorite is. It is like a driver trying to tune in an FM station just at the periphery of the broadcast range, sometimes the signal is clear but at other times, all the listener is receiving is static. In any event, every contestant in the GOP field would do a better job than the current resident of the White House.

Friday, August 19, 2011

The international do-gooder crowd, you know the Peace Corps-type, always pontificate about building bridges not fences, but when your neighbors are as rotten as many in the Middle East and South Asia, give me the fence and a strong one any day. The cultural exchange will solve everything crowd did not envision the sort of nihilist that has arisen and proliferated the Arab world, Pakistan, and Afghanistan- the sort of monster that would hang the eight year old son of a police chief or strap a bomb vest to a preteen girl, or blow up a girls' school, or attack females who have the temerity to want to learn to read with poison gas. There can be no outreach toward those who enforce ignorance and attack education. There is little reason that a British Cultural Centre is in Kabul as such an enterprise will never elevate the locals and only serve as a rallying point to attack as happened yesterday. In an ideal world, the hands across the water would bring diverse peoples together and these bridges would work but today, in the real world, the decent need impregnable walls- the stronger the fence the better.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Terrorist murderers attacked innocent Israelis today, killing seven including six civilians and wounding more than twenty others. The world was quick to condemn this outrage but calls for "restraint from both sides" came from many corners internationally. Demanding "restraint" from the Jewish State is at the least a tacit endorsement that the killings were justifiable as would be insisting Israel respond "proportionately". What is the proportionate response to blowing up noncombatants with an anti-tank missile? Should Israel wait until six unarmed Palestinians crowd into a minibus and blow it up with a rocket? These international pleas for Israel holding back and if it does retaliate, doing so in a measured way, are patently offensive to decency and invite more attacks on the Jewish populace and if heeded, show Israel no longer merits any respect for her ability at deterrence and that those ruling Israel care more for the opinion of international Jew-haters than the lives and safety of Israel's own citizenry. After all, an Israeli leadership that possesses the tools to subdue terror but does not out of worry over condemnation by the inherently anti-Israel United Nations is almost as immoral as the Jihadist murderers themselves.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Barack Hussein Obama was thought to be and characterized as a "uniter" and as a "post-racial" figure and that would have been ideal, but like so much else of the promise of Obama, in the event all Obama managed was to disappoint. The reality is that America is more racially polarized now than when Obama entered office, and it is on both the white and black side of the major racial divide in the United States. I have never before seen the degree of anti-black venom being spewed on many Drudge-linked stories that I am witnessing now (though Matt Drudge bears no responsibility for the comment section on stories and videos linked to his site). Recent video of a store being looted that appeared on YouTube had copious "n-words" in submissions from viewers and it is disgusting. No one was injured in the "flash mob" grab and go organized shoplifting expedition. It was a coordinated effort that netted a few thousand dollars in merchandise and was criminal but it was not murder, mayhem, or maiming, just some opportunistic youth doing the wrong thing. The worst crimes committed in human history were Communist purges in Russia by whites and China by Asians, and the Holocaust with the perpetrators again white Germans and their almost exclusively white collaborators, and the internecine murder spree by the Khmer Rouge killing fellow Cambodians. What a few young people did in sporadic incidences of property crime and a handful of isolated physical assaults in no way justifies scorn being poured on a single race, when over ninety-nine percent of that race was not involved in any of the incidents and where community leaders have come out to immediately condemn and abhor the mob action. This by no means absolves those fomenting violence and agitating over grievances settled in the 1960s for stoking racial strife from the black portion of the race equation. Among those who have deliberately exacerbated the race tension, Al Sharpton and the New Black Panther Party spring to mind. Decent people of every race must stand against the rabble-rousers on any side and where mobs form, decent people must stand with the authorities to turn them back.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Barack Hussein Obama has forced the American taxpayer to pay more than two million dollars for his brand new buses which have no purpose beyond advancing Obama's 2012 campaign for reelection to the US Presidency. The expense for such a naked political tool should have been borne by the Democrat Party, their national campaign committee, or the Obama campaign committee itself. Please explain what other uses beyond electioneering in the style of the old whistle stop tours on trains these buses will serve? The cost for a solely political enterprise properly belongs to the candidate and his political party and these buses as far as I can discern are solely and only for use in the raw politics of Obama's campaign to retain the Presidency.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Warren Weinstein has been abducted in Pakistan. In all likelihood, Mr. Weinstein has been or will be murdered and in an odious, torturous way. What ever could possess an educated, multilingual, purportedly intelligent American and Jew to accept employment in Pakistan, one of the most openly belligerent places on earth to US citizens in general and rabidly hateful of Jews in particular? Had such an erudite and accomplished individual as Weinstein not heard the fate that befell Daniel Pearl? Had he figured with discernibly Jewish name and Western appearance he could somehow blend in? I hope he lives to regret his mistake and not have to pay the ultimate price for wanting to lift bloodthirsty atavists out of their misery, but I am sadly certain video will soon be produced with Weinstein confessing to masked captors who have grievously and woefully injured him to extract these untruths that he is both an agent of the American Central Intelligence Agency and a Zionist spy. Hate-filled genocidal primitives do not need the copious aid we provide but to be utterly defeated where they no longer pose a threat to Westerners as individuals and to our very civilization.

From the United Kingdom to American cities as wide ranging as Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Philadelphia, the younger generation has lost the rudiments of self-control that define society. This transgenerational dissonance was observed in the Summer of Revolution in 1968 with concordant accompanying violence and the racial aspect seen now was present in America in notorious Watts and (slightly prior to that, in 1967 in) Detroit which really has never recovered. It is undeniable that in all the recent aforementioned cases that blacks lashed out against all other races. This is not to say in any way that only those of African ancestry participated in looting in Great Britain but even there East Asians seemed disproportionally targeted by blacks with at least three murdered so far. The solution to this problem is not more welfare but restructuring the welfare system to keep families united and the father in the home. A society that rewards sloth and takes the man from the household will soon decay to the point of savagery.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Perplexed patriots are just starting to have a bit more clarity as Republican contenders come to the fore and America begins to grasp who will vanquish Barack Hussein Obama and enter the process of saving our country. The Iowa GOP straw poll has been won by the excellent and informed Michele Bachmann. She has what it takes to confront Obama on the issues and fix what ails the country. Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, also declared his Presidential candidacy Saturday in the early primary state of South Carolina. Perry has been a friend to the illegal alien and mandated a human papillomavirus vaccine that assumes promiscuity on the part of Texas elementary school-age (eleven and twelve year old) girls. Perry also is said he was fine with homosexual marriage in New York. Bachmann remains a selection that I could heartily endorse and support who when elected to the Presidency will implement policies that return jobs and prosperity across the United States.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on his lecturing tour again. After repeatedly condemning Israel for (nonexistent) human rights violations, the Turkish Prime Minister has been warning Bashar Assad of Syria to restrain himself in countering protests across his troubled land. Erdogan is a fine one to talk as he has conducted a brutal campaign of repression against indigenous Kurds in their ancestral homeland even sending Turkish forces to murder troops in Iraq. Erdogan has waged a campaign to purge the Turkish military of his political opponents who might resist Erdogan's Islamization of the country which conflicts with the Constitution under which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk formed modern Turkey as a secular republic. Erdogan did nothing to prevent the murder of the most prominent Turkish advocate of justice for the Armenians, and Erdogan gave a wink and a nod to systemic discrimination against Turkey's tiny remaining Christian population, fostering a climate wherein his Islamist fellow travelers knew that Turkey would countenance the slaughter of three men of the staff of a Christian publishing house. Bashar Assad needs to be removed but does not need to hear the braying of a fellow ruthless dictator like Erdogan who seeks the power of the Sultan.

Friday, August 12, 2011

It is not diminished economic circumstance that drives an individual to commit an act of terror or riot. It is a poverty of values that impels them. I remember the wife of then Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cherie Blair saying she understood the desperation that drove Palestinian suicide bombers. She explained that the poor murderers "feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up" back in 2002. I wonder if after the 7/7 bombing Ms. Blair felt the same way? (The 7/7 terrorists came by the way from relatively privileged backgrounds.) Those who wage mob action against the ordered society are doing so not because they are economically deprived, but because they are miscreants. Many of those arrested have been squarely from the middle classes and a few have even been from wealthy backgrounds. What they lack is not means but a moral compass that was generally considered in past ages to be part of being human. The members of the mob looting and burning in Britain have forfeited their very humanity.

Innocent people have died in the riots in England. Property damage is in the hundreds of millions. Fear stalks the streets in many urban areas. Those who committed offenses must be dealt with- not with the all too common slap on the wrist- but with as Draconian punishment as law allows. They must be made an example of and it is a shame that more summary and public punishment has been abolished. There was a time when the criminal feared the righteous wrath of the public and the lawful authority. Now the authorities and the public are chased down the streets by the thugs, and for there to remain an England, that must end.

Watching the Iowa debate last night, one must conclude that any of the Republican candidates participating would do a better job in the nation's highest office than Barack Hussein Obama. That is not to say that certain debaters did not distinguish themselves last night. Michele Bachmann stood her ground against fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty who has no traction or momentum of his own and seemed to be acting as a stalking horse for Mitt Romney who is most threatened by the rise of Bachmann to true contender status. Rick Santorum also proved in command of the facts and principled and called Ron Paul on his states rights' fetish and hostility to Israel. Paul certainly separated himself from the crowd as well giving his distorted "history lesson" blaming the United States for Iran's hostility for the supposed US sin of installing the Shah to power. Would Representative Paul have preferred Iran with her immense oil reserves and strategic importance to have fallen into the Soviet camp back then? The Shah's secret police, the SAVAK, were no bargain, but it is inarguable from America's national interest perspective that the Shah was the better alternative to either a takeover of Iran by Russia or Soviet proxies and certainly better than the current mullah regime. Herman Cain once again demonstrated passion and conviction. All in all, the Republican field (even Ron Paul) showed they would do less harm than the bungler currently destroying our country.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

When the GOP will not stand their ground on any issue, when they make common cause with Team Obama, when they ridicule and attack their own conservative voters, when they stand for nothing, when will it be time to take the dozen or so true conservative US Senators and the less than one hundred authentic conservative members of the US House of Representatives and start a new "real right" political party? We are "hobbits" and the skunk at the punch bowl at the Republican ball. The GOP is not the party of Reagan, he was the anomaly, but the party of Rockefeller, Bob Michel, and Susan Collins. John McCain who gratuitously insults us is real Republican as the party exists today; Sarah Palin who shares our values is the unwelcome outsider. The moderate main stream of GOP politicos occasionally will work together with the small government, personal responsibility values voter as in the last (failed) Presidential election, but we right wingers are used for their opportunistic convenience and attempts at personal advancement, while in Washington, they betray our votes and interests with remarkable consistency. The alacrity with which they declare their affinity for Kennedys or Kerry and compliment the collegial atmosphere in the Senate while Harry Reid conspires with Obama to dismantle the nation demonstrates unequivocally that most of the GOP Senate contingent shares nothing with us. If the Republican "elite" continue to slap us in the face, it will be time to go third party.

Bashar al-Assad is proving to be somewhat less of a reformer than many of those in the West including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had hoped. Bashar is however showing himself to be the apple of his ruthless and bloodthirsty father Hafez al-Assad's eye, and just like Daddy, Bashar is merrily slaughtering the Syrian people. He has turned tanks on peaceful protesters and the death toll of Bashar's oppression mounts everyday and has passed two thousand. The so-called world powers have reacted with varying degrees of dismay to this bloodletting of the innocent, but so far all the world can muster to protect Syrians is feckless sanctions (and worthless talk). While the world is aghast at the massacre in progress, one safe bet is that if Hafez Assad still drew breath, he would be mighty proud of Bashar.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

As we have witnessed London coming undone and Britain burning, we are seeing what may well be prologue to what is coming to the streets of American cities. With no relief in the unemployment crisis, particularly youth unemployment, burning shops may soon be coming to a street near you. Already in Wisconsin and Philadelphia, thuggery with an undeniable racial tinge has been unleashed on the unprepared, the innocent and unwary. If real consequence is not quickly meted out to the offenders in these US flareups, expect violence similar to what Great Britain is dealing with to visit other urban areas soon.

According to local ABC-affiliate TV station WKRN, the Nashville Association of Realtors announced that home sales in Nashville were up fifteen percent last month and that three hundred more homes sold here in July than sold in July of 2010 and that sales would "only get better". I call that whistling past the graveyard or a bad case of undue optimism, hope triumphing over experience, or public relations (PR) in a battle with reality that PR is destined not to win. Driving through Nashville neighborhoods, one sees the same homes on the market for many months and as often or not for sale signs emblazoned with "New Price" or "Price Reduced". It appears to be anything but a bull market in Nashville homes from that perspective.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

I am a believer in the Hand of Providence, and I beseech my readers to say a prayer for my father. He is eighty-nine and has just been admitted to hospital. Depending on his situation, this web log may lag in the coming days. Thank you.

President Barack Hussein Obama intends to pour the rest of the productive private sector into the creation of a new "flux capacitor" where we can turn back time to where we had a good economy. Obama will even ask well-known Democrat-sympathizer Michael J. Fox to pilot the new "revive the economy my means of looting it until we achieve time travel" program which is every bit as likely as returning prosperity to the nation by taxing the few productive job creators we have left.

London is suffering devastation not seen since the V-2 and V-1 buzz bombings and fires as bad as the Blitz, but this is not act of God or accident like the Great Fire of 1666 but a deliberate destruction coldly perpetrated by disaffected youth. The rioting has now spread to other British cities as those without sufficient parental influence act out. When the strong hand of discipline is absent in the home, the state may have to impose the order missing in the home. This is in no way justification for fascism or asking for a police state. One reason that chaos has prevailed in Britain is that England has disarmed her own law-abiding and greatly diminished the right of self-defense. It has been aptly stated that an armed society is a polite society. In London, we see a very impolite element at play.

Monday, August 8, 2011

The markets are so heartened by Obama's speech that the Dow dropped another hundred points. The other indices were so buoyed and cheered by the new found confidence Obama instilled that they crashed as well. I imagine many an investor is pleading with President Barack Hussein Obama to just be quiet awhile and give their shares and 401(k)s a fighting chance to recover. Each time the President pontificates on matters economic, I count myself (literally) poorer for the experience.

I foresee many a voter's worst nightmare coming to pass. Our one trick pony current President Barack Hussein Obama, whose only strategy is shilling class warfare, will be defeated, by the guileless faux conservative Mitt Romney who will use dissatisfaction with Obama and pandering to the Right that he will betray in office to gain the US Presidency. Romney is essentially on the same big government, statist team as Obama and just has a different jersey number. As governor of Massachusetts Romney was consistently liberal in social policy and instituted the first mandate from a state or commonwealth that its citizens must buy medical insurance. Romney created Obamacare before Obama. Romney is distinction without difference and would only make cosmetic changes in America's governance when a course correction back to conservatism is needed to save the country. Between the Limburger cheese now in the White House and the jack mackerel out in the steaming summer heat trying to depose him, both stink to high heaven and I wish to vote for neither.

Chaos prevails on the streets of London. In Athens, anarchists set a bank alight. They meant to burn the building. The three bankers who were killed were purely incidental. None of those organizing the riots in Greece are brought to account. The guilty do not turn themselves in or even offer their apologies to the families of the murdered. Yet when a carabinieri fires on a black flag troublemaker about to throw a petrol bomb in Italy, the policeman is termed a "murderer" in the Left media and the government says "sorry" and investigates officer use of excessive force. Even at the Wisconsin State Fair in the cradle of Midwestern values, violence erupts on the streets. The individual's right to life and property are inextricably tied. One can not exist without the other and it is a person's natural right to defend both. America was supposed to have enshrined the individual rights to protect both life and property, but under the current administration, it is no given that a citizen can under law safeguard either. Europe is in crisis, but the United States is not far behind in being bad off. Grab your gold and hide your gun now.

Barack Hussein Obama is not the first populist demagogue in the history of American politics, but he is the first such creature to gain the nation's highest office. Late Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long was possessed of similar political proclivities. Long attempted to pit the poor against those who were better-off. With such an exploiter inhabiting the Oval Office, the decline of the economy was utterly predictable. A class envy game player has led the country precisely where he wants it to be. Obama postures himself as fighting for the underdog in America (and around the world), but he is no shining knight-protector. Real modern day Spartans fell in Afghanistan, so that the usurper-in-chief could turn American against American back home and position himself as the faultless savior.

The United States government, a well-known billionaire, and the main stream media have turned their collective wrath against a credit rating agency. Obama administration members, Warren Buffet, and the usual suspects in the press are lambasting Standard & Poor's. Even occasional conservative George Will fires across the rating agency's bow. Is it not astounding how quickly the wolf pack rallies? Was Standard & Poor's a villain last Monday? Would S&P have been suddenly deemed "incredible" if they had ignored economic fact, pretended all was rosy, and maintained the highest possible rating for America's Federal government as they spend wildly and print increasingly worthless fiat currency? The quarterback (Barack Hussein Obama) is in trouble so the very offensive line (political and media sycophants) resorts to holding.

A criminal attempts to kill a policeman but miraculously the bullet that he fired was deflected by the armed officer's radio. The brave officer returns fire and the miscreant dies. This does not happen on the seedy streets of some US metropolis, but in London, England, and incredibly, riots with an undeniable racial component and looting are sparked as a result. The police are showing remarkable restraint toward people attacking them and even trying to kill them with Molotov cocktails, but innocent people are being hurt by these lawless thugs and property is being damaged and destroyed. Instead of promising investigations into the police to placate demonstrators, those in power in Britain should tell the forces of order to take the gloves off and chase the rioters from the streets.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Was the Chinook downing in Afghanistan a piece of incredible bad luck for the forces of civilization battling the seventh century throwback Taliban or something potentially far more sinister? Did a rocket-propelled grenade turn into a magic bullet sort of one in a million shot or have some variety of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles been supplied to Afghan insurgents by a foreign country- most probably Iran? Intelligence sources are aware of the remaining inventory of aging American-made Stinger missiles that were exchanged by the US for Lebanon-abducted American hostages back during the Oliver North, Iran-Contra era. These weapons would be obsolescent now but still plenty functional to shoot down a large relatively slow-moving helicopter, particularly if the missile avionics were given a recent tweak to overcome today's electronic countermeasures. Then there is the possibility that a nation (likely again Iran) has supplied newer Russian-manufactured SAMs or their Red-Chinese made clone shoulder-launched rockets to threaten aviation over Afghanistan. Then there may still be the old Stingers and perhaps Blowpipe anti-aircraft man-portable systems given to the mujahideen to resist the Soviets with back when the West was aligned with the indigenous resistance predecessors of the Taliban to reverse the Russian aggression that could bring down a Chinook. Is it conceivable an RPG could be the deadly culprit? Yes of course it is, but use of a more sophisticated purpose-built anti-aircraft rocket perhaps recently provided by Iran can not yet be ruled out. With Iran backing the Assad regime in Syria, with Iran destabilizing Bahrain, with Iran pushing the Islamists in Egypt, with Iranian proxy Hezbollah having subsumed Lebanon, with Iran orchestrating terror against Israel from Gaza and into the heartland of the Jewish State, with the Mullahs of Tehran soon gaining atomic weaponry, would it not be in Iran's interest to inflict carnage on the Great Satan and its allies in neighboring Afghanistan? Iran's may have bloody fingerprints all over the fallen Chinook.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Standard & Poor's has downgraded America and now the nation waits for the other shoe to drop. Will the other credit rating agencies follow suit? How much will this action boost borrowing costs for the US, of course, but all borrowing costs could rise right down to the cost of credit card interest for every individual who carries a balance and to the cost of car loans and mortgages? There is no good news here. The S&P downgrade is a blow caused by our free-spending politicians, is another insult any recovery in the economy must overcome, and has been inflicted on every single American.

America is engulfed in Barack Hussein Obama's war in Afghanistan using his rules of engagement (ROE) and this includes trying to reach a negotiated settlement with the atavistic Taliban. Obama's schizophrenic policy of introducing a large number of forces but tying their hands while trying to talk to those who protected Osama bin Laden and are still doing all they can to kill Americans is leading to the needless slaughter of US forces. The military of the United States has incalculable power to devastate or even destroy the world but because of some pretended moral imperative, we have taken countless military options off the table in the fight against the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda there. We do not carpet bomb or saturate with artillery but put troops on the ground, inserting them at great risk, to protect supposed non-combatants who are actually in virtual universal sympathy with the jihadists and from whom the Taliban draw much support and many of their numbers. In other words, we are losing American lives to protect people who want to kill us. The cost for the United States today for our "courageous restraint" was thirty-one (31) American troops whose Chinook helicopter was evidently shot down and who may not have fallen under more robust rules of engagement up to and including total war with the goal of victory. A nation should never wage war to reach a negotiated settlement with a dastardly opponent but to defeat that enemy to the point of sufficient destruction that the adversary pleads to submit. Remember how General William Tecumseh Sherman said he intended to defeat the Southern Confederacy, he intended to "make Georgia howl". America and our allies should inflict enough pain on the Taliban that they beg to surrender or are wiped from the earth.

Friday, August 5, 2011

"Sound as a dollar" used to be a token of high esteem. Now it has become invective- what was blessed is cursed and is only growing worse. Our credit rating as a nation has been downgraded but not as much as the US being regarded as a power to be reckoned with has been diminished and our prestige as a nation has simply vanished.

Do hundreds of new government regulations, many springing forth from the Environmental Protection Agency, seem the ideal way to spark job creation? I think this is not so much a path to creating jobs as to finishing off the few vestigial remnants of the industrial economy of the United States, but Obama and his acolytes are imposing bureaucratic manacles because they claim that they are determined to save the world from man-caused global warming in the same week a survey shows sixty-nine percent of Americans asked believe global warming is a hoax. How does more interference from Washington D.C. help those on Main Street, USA open new factories or employ new workers? How can potential business owners risk money when they know a faceless bureaucrat can throttle their plans after much capital has already been invested? What Americans are yearning for is not more inspection from Federal authorities, more paperwork that burdens unduly, and more nanny state strangulation, but a government that remembers to allow us to mind our business. Otherwise, entrepreneurship is dead and we are no longer citizens but subjects in our own country.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

With a 500-point drop, the Dow Jones Industrial average gave a giant thumb down to the debt ceiling agreement and the direction Team Obama (Reid, Pelosi) are taking the United States of America. This should not be considered the start of a double dip but simply a continuation of the Obama recession which really never ended for many Americans. Supply and demand in the free market lifts economic circumstances. Obama should try it.

Our political elite in their infinite (or is that infant?) wisdom have spent the United States into oblivion. The stock markets are reeling, down more than 300 on the Dow as I write, a reflection by investors of the confidence they have in our political (mis)leadership. We mere peons are told that we could not possibly grasp the sophisticated issues at hand much less the nuance that our betters are thanklessly navigating us through- to which I say "balderdash". The public generally understands that America is printing fiat currency with nothing but hope behind it and that the US Treasury has monetized our national debt. They have bought our Treasury instruments with more debt, paying for borrowed money with more borrowing. We are on the path to irreversible decline led by an evil cabal that is deliberately wreaking this destruction upon us. I will happily remain a prole with common sense while our cognoscenti confer degrees upon each other and self-congratulate in the manner of Onan.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Back in the late 1970s and into the early eighties when John Maynard Keynes was dead and thankfully Ronald Reagan wasn't, a breed of economist who were consistently pessimistic were featured prominently on national media. They generally forecast bad times that were only destined to grow worse and that was when Barack Hussein Obama was still in short pants. Their number featured Joe Granville and Howard Ruff and their predicted gloom would have been dead on had Jimmy Carter somehow won reelection. The most prominent voices brimming with optimism to counter the predicted malaise were a handful of right wing economists who appeared on Wall Street Week and the host himself, the (lamentably) late Louis Rukeyser. It was not merely atmospherics but substantive changes in policy, not Ronald Reagan's glowing optimism but the new direction of government that turned the economy around. The difference between then and now being that Jimmy Carter was a bumbler surrounded by even lesser men and Barack Obama isn't. Everything Barack Hussein Obama does in office has an easily foreseeable result, which is to suggest that the economic dislocation being wrought is absolutely intentional. The more America's fiscal house is wrecked, the more power Obama aggregates to himself and his cadre. The bromide goes "failing to plan is planning to fail", but in Obama's case, planning the nation's ungentle decline is intended to produce drastic dependency on government and foster a new authoritarianism.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Norovirus on a luxury cruise/ A bathroom in Istanbul that an elephant just used/ A TSA screener from Pelican Bay/ And where he grabbed me I'd rather not say/ Submitting to people that you can not sue/ Whose very presence you come to rue/ But poor ole traveler you best just make due/ If they were your fast food servers,/ You'd throw the burger away/ But you are Federally-compelled, you just have to obey/ Or a trip to the pen is on the way/ Tired from driving on a stressful day/ A motel respite will save the day/ Wake up with bedbugs or are they lice?/ Try not to step on the gifts from the mice/ America has become a cesspool, a slum/ Where a hard working Joe is treated like a bum/ You used to look forward to the free time to travel/ But all your bon voyage dreams have began to unravel/ Who knew you would so look forward to getting back to work?/ At least there you don't have to deal with the TSA jerk.

What is a few trillion dollars between such good friends, particularly when our good friends in government are intent not just on separating us from the money we earn but are destroying any possibility that the United States will return to prosperity? The fake solution put forward by the US Congress does not address real problems. A scheme with a commission comprised of equal numbers from the US Senate and House will have to advance particular cuts or automatic cuts will kick in including Medicare cuts and cuts of other social programs that might be both palatable to conservatives and necessary for the nation but these cuts are accompanied by half of the $2.4 trillion in cuts coming from the nation's defense which might placate America's political left but which would by necessity both compromise national security and force the nation to wrap up the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before victory is attained. There has been nothing but continuing recession for most Americans under Obama and raising the debt ceiling in the manner they just did will provide a new moniker for this Congress- "recovery killers".

Monday, August 1, 2011

No serious person would dare countenance default by the government of the United States, but the deal under consideration to raise the so-called debt ceiling seems simply atrocious. What is not needed but what is offered are accounting tricks and tripwires for what would become automatic tax increases imposed by a bipartisan commission in the teeth of continuing economic downturn. This new-found mechanism (like bipartisan military base closing commissions that absolve politicians of responsibility for hard choices that carry a political cost) will have provided cover for RINO politicians who will not openly vote for raising taxes but who are willing to go along with higher taxes so long as they can wash their hands of them. Once again, laying blame off on others becomes the priority over solving our fiscal problems and putting order to America's crumbling fiscal house by really cutting spending and having meaningful, systemic reform of Social Security and Medicare (which incidentally, is the only way to save these entitlement programs).